A built in mac-like dock, completely different styling on components, no weird bottom window bar, no windows-like application menu, customized theme engine, built in window tiling. Just a few little differences.
The claim is Mate can do almost everything this DE does, so switching to yet another wannabe Mac DE isn't worth the hassle. (I'd be interested had they broke away from this ubiquitous Mac mimicry.)
KDE is fully based on graphics accelerated drawing, it is expected AFAIK. MATE is mostly software-rendered unless extended with Compiz.
Basically, yeah. They can all be made to look and feel identical to each other, and their functionalities are supersets of MacOS launcher functionality set.
